Talk show host Miller (as in HBO's Dennis Miller Live) reconnoiters the sorry state of the nation with a gathering of raving, raging monologues. ``Now,'' he usually starts, ``I don't want to get off on a rant here,'' whereupon the sage of cable TV walks the walk and talks the talk. Commenting on current events, Miller is a latter- day Will Rogers on speed. He's hot. He's cool. He's truly hip as he steers a course between laughs and logic. The editorial fustian covers everything from infomercials to schadenfreude, activism to parenthood, with a nod, inevitably, to the O.J. trial. He knows about men and women. ``Women don't like guys who are dangerous,'' he instructs. ``Women want us to think that because women are trying to kill us.'' There are references to multitudes who have achieved a few moments of fame and are scratching for the rest of their allotted 15 minutes. (Who will be able to identify Gary Busey, Dave Del Dotto, or Rico Suave a year from now? Who can identify them now?) The rap doesn't eschew all of the Seven Dirty Words, either, but, hey, ``it's a madhouse out there,'' says Miller. He feels ``like Heston waking up in the field and seeing the chimp on top of the pony.'' So don't expect Leno or Letterman (though there is an occasional decalogue not unlike a Letterman list). In Miller's Manichaean view everything is either Good or, more likely, Bad, and all is painted either black or blue. But as he admits in his standard tag line, ``that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.'' Much of the mockery is ephemeral hipster babble at a fever pitch, but there's also common sense and, okay, even a nugget of wisdom in what could be, if one stretches the point, a kind of self-helper for those simpletons whom Miller calls ``mooks.''
Pub Date: April 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47804-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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